OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS. And finally, the most important thing! All the industrial and commercial centers of England at present possess a working class that is divided into two hostile camps: the English proletariat and the Irish proletariat. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his average living standard. He feels himself, in relation to him, a member of the ruling nation and precisely for this reason becomes an instrument in the hands of his aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland and thereby strengthens their domination OVER HIMSELF. He harbors religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. He treats him roughly in the same way that poor whites treat Negroes in the former slaveholding states of the American Union. The Irishman repays him in the same coin with interest. He sees in the English worker simultaneously a fellow participant in and a blind instrument of English domination in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially maintained and intensified by the press, church sermons, humorous journals—in short, by all means at the disposal of the ruling classes. In this antagonism lies the secret of the helplessness of the English working class, despite its organization. And in it also lies the secret of the preserved power of the capitalist class. The latter is fully conscious of this.

But the evil does not end there. It spills across the ocean. The antagonism between English and Irish is the hidden foundation of the conflict between the United States and England. It makes impossible any serious and sincere cooperation between the working classes of both countries. It enables the governments of both countries always, whenever it suits them, to deprive the social conflict of its acuteness by setting both countries against each other and, if necessary, by means of war between them.

England, as the metropolis of capital, as the power still dominant on the world market, remains for now the most important country for the workers' revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions of this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. Therefore, the most important aim of the International Working Men's Association is to accelerate the social revolution in England. And the sole means to that end is to make Ireland independent. Therefore, the International must set itself the task of everywhere bringing the conflict between England and Ireland to the fore and everywhere openly taking the side of Ireland. The special task of the Central Council in London is to awaken in the English working class the consciousness that the national liberation of Ireland is for it not an abstract question of justice and philanthropy, but the first condition of its own social liberation. (pp. 226-228)